Taen said it isn't strong enough, he thought, fumbling for the light switch, then thinking better of it. The light might attract the skar.
Louder than the ventilators atop the transparent dome of the city rose the staccato airblasting of the skar. With a haunting shriek, it collided with its long, wingless shadow against the window screen. A twang, the glint of a spear quivering in the wire. A hiss and a rustle and it was gone.
By the time it struck again, Jeff had lifted the amulet Taen gave him from the night table. As he squeezed the release button, he could feel the angry vibration of the minute warrior within. A mosquito-like whine faded after a red fleck of light no larger than the eye of an insect. Like a tiny meteor, the prisoner of the amulet flashed across the mirror and quenched within the skar.
The long airsquid stuttered and blundered against the laughing mask with a crackle of its exoskeleton. As it tumbled out of sight behind the foot of the bed, Jeff slid his feet to the rug and fished for his slipper. He was in time to catch the skar slithering weakly across the rug, pumping air like a man with a crushed chest. It popped when he hit it with his slipper. Bending, white-muscled, across the moonlight, he searched for his minute defender. But its light had gone out. What he did see was the ugly gleam of man-made poison on the beak of the skar.
"Konrad, no, please," Kit's little-girl voice called from her sleep. Then she breathed regularly again.
The young doctor gritted his teeth as he closed the window and cautiously fished his pajamas from beneath the bed covers.
Tip-toeing down the cold tile hallway, buttoning up against the cold breath of the dome ventilators with his left hand while he gripped the skar with the strong, surgeon's fingers of his right, he looked more like a tousled-headed boy than a doctor, until a year ago chief surgeon on an intergalactic liner.
Quiet as he was, Taen's huge, fierce eyes met his around the varicose-veined marble pillar in the vestibule.
"Poisoned, sire." Taen's harsh voice contained more statement than question as he hopped forward, three-jointed legs still folded in his servile stance, for erect he would have stood even taller than Jeff, and rising from one's customary place indoors, according to Taen, was unthinkable. At Jeff's suggestions that he stand, he would wave his white, prosthetic hands in horror. It was not in accord with "the unwritten laws."